France’s draft plan to ban on wearing the burqa would involve a fine of €150 for wearing the full veil, Le Monde reports.
Anyone forcing a woman to wear a full veil faces up to a year in prison and a €15,000 fine.
Meanwhile, Belgium’s draft law would make it a crime to wear clothing that covers or partly covers the face. Penalties would include a fine of up to €25 and a week in prison, the FT reports.
Politicians in the Netherlands and Italy have pushed for similar measures.
As the era of the dark side recedes a little, my sense of the looming
reality is as follows. The men who ordered a man tied to a chair,
doused in water, and chilled to hypothermia so intense he had to be
rushed to emergency medical care, the men who presided over at least
two dozen and at most a hundred prisoners tortured to death,
the men who ordered an American servicewoman to smear fake menstrual
blood over a Muslim's face in order to win a war against Jihadism, the
men who ordered innocents stripped naked, sexually abused, terrified by
dogs, or cast into darkness with no possibility of a future, and did
all this in the name of the Constitution of the United States, the men
who gave the signal in wartime that there were no limits to what could
be done to prisoners of war and reaped a whirlwind of abuse and torture
that will haunt American service members for decades: these men will
earn the judgment of history. It will be brutal.
Andrew Sullivan on the end of the Bush years.
Simon Jenkins on Britain’s illiberal and senseless drugs policy:
Leaving ecstasy in class A
on the grounds that "there is no such thing as a safe dose" is public
stupidity. On this basis there is no safe alcoholic drink or cigarette.
There is no safe tree, no safe ladder and, according to Smith, no safe
mobile phone. Do we ban trees, ladders and mobiles? Lurking behind them
all is an accident waiting to happen, a terrorist incident, a loss of
state control. Smith’s nostrum may be music to the health and safety
industry, but not to common sense.
The British government wants to create a database that would keep track of everyone’s calls, emails, texts and internet use.
Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, who has
firsthand experience of working with intelligence and law enforcement
agencies, told the Guardian:
The tendency of the state to seek ever more powers of surveillance
over its citizens may be driven by protective zeal. But the notion of
total security is a paranoid fantasy which would destroy everything
that makes living worthwhile. We must avoid surrendering our freedom as
autonomous human beings to such an ugly future. We should make
judgments that are compatible with our status as free people.
Maintaining
the capacity to intercept suspicious communications was critical in an
increasingly complex world, he said.
It is a process which can save
lives and bring criminals to justice. But no other country is
considering such a drastic step. This database would be an unimaginable
hell-house of personal private information… It would be a
complete readout of every citizen’s life in the most intimate and
demeaning detail. No government of any colour is to be trusted with
such a roadmap to our souls.
The government’s proposals must be resisted at all costs.
Damian Green and I don’t see eye to eye on immigration, but I find his arrest, questioning and the search of his home and office by counter-terrorism police outrageous.
According to the BBC, police suspect the Conservative immigration spokesman of “conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office” and “aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office”, basically making public information leaked from the Home Office. But as Willem Buiter rightly says:
Using the counter-terror unit to investigate an alleged offence which,
even if it had been committed, would not be terrorism-related, is an
abuse of power. These are the methods used commonly in police states. They have no place in the UK.
This year’s Privacy International survey put Britain bottom of the European
league for surveillance and civil intrusion. In his last column for the Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins urges us all to fight to defend freedom against government encroachment:
Never was the adage of Louis Brandeis, the US justice, more relevant: free men
are naturally alert to the wiles of evil-minded rulers but “the greatest
dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal,
well-meaning but without understanding”.
Now the government wants to create a giant database that would store the details of every phone call, text message, and webpage visited by everyone in Britain: Big Brother will be watching every move you make.
[Home Secretary Jacqui] Smith parrots the totalitarian’s answer that “the innocent have nothing to
fear”. But they do. They know from experience that government cannot be
trusted with private information. In addition, any errors in that
information are almost impossible to correct.
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